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The Catholic Historical Review 87.1 (2001) 121-122



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Book Review

Receiving Erin's Children:
Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish Famine Migration, 1845-1855


Receiving Erin's Children: Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish Famine Migration, 1845-1855. By J. Matthew Gallman. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2000. Pp. xiii, 306. $55.00 clothbound; $19.95 paperback.)

J. Matthew Gallman, Henry R. Luce Professor of Civil War Studies at Gettysburg College, has undertaken an ingenious, but ultimately limited, comparative study of mid-nineteenth-century urban societies in Britain and the United States. His goal, broadly defined, is to understand how and why the historical development of British and American cities differed. To expose these differences, he has examined the ways in which two port cities with comparable resources--Liverpool and Philadelphia--dealt with problems of poverty, disease, and criminality as they struggled to cope with a huge influx of Irish famine migrants.

To guide his research Professor Gallman has investigated the extent to which the cities' responses conformed to fourteen "historiographic" models--seven derived from Derek Frazier's important study of the evolution of British social policy, and seven drawn from the literature on American exceptionalism. Because his real interest lies in the realm of social policy and urban development, Gallman treats "Erin's Children," the Irish migrants themselves, only perfunctorily, as the objects of policymakers' concerns.

To test his historiographic models Professor Gallman examines specific policies generated in response to several matters of pressing concern: "poverty, sanitation, housing, disease, sectarian and ethnic conflict, crime and policing, and education and delinquency." At times he offers shrewd and striking observations, as when he shows that the influx of famine migrants did not, as is often assumed, cause a significant rise in criminality. He finds that nearly all the models had at best limited power to explain the differences he seeks to elucidate. In the end only three factors remained--"localism, voluntarism, and abundance." Americans, he argues, far more than Britons, relied on "local" rather than "national" institutions. They also tended to form "voluntaristic" private associations to deal with problems that in Britain would typically be addressed by formal governmental bodies. Finally, he argues, America's geographic situation, its location far from Ireland and the fact that it possessed a vast and abundant hinterland, [End Page 122] shaped the way in which local officials conceived solutions to the problems that beset them. These systematic tendencies affected even the Catholic communities in the two cities. Gallman notes that Philadelphia's Catholics, more affluent than Liverpool's and more attuned to traditions of localism and voluntarism, responded to the mid-century crisis by forming and funding a far greater variety of local private associations to aid the immigrants.

In the end Professor Gallman finds that Philadelphia and Liverpool were far more similar than different and the disparities were "largely matters of degree" rather than kind. He notes that in the long run both societies were moving along the same course, toward today's strongly centralized decision-making, and concludes that the differences in policy making were essentially a matter of timing. America's abundance, and its traditions of voluntarism and localism, he argues, retarded the nation's progress toward a strongly centralized society. These traditions, though, are far from dead in American culture and, as recent events have shown, still influence policy decisions. Gallman closes with the speculation that a future historian might produce a study similar to his showing the persistent influence of localism, voluntarism, and abundance in late-twentieth-century America.



Dale B. Light
Capitol College
Penn State University

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